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A Secret Country

Page 36

by John Pilger


  C. Y. O’Connor’s Great Pipe does not reach here. There is no running water. Water has to be trucked in, or caught on the rare occasions it falls from the sky. Harry turned off the engine of his tractor and switched on the ABC’s rural news. The first item reported a 30 per cent drop in rainfall throughout Australia during the previous ten years. Harry shook his head and got back into his tractor. He has no help; there is just him and Kath and their son-in-law, Rob. Their eldest son, Greg, was killed on his motor-bike in 1985. ‘We had a fifteen-year plan to hand everything over to Greg,’ said Harry. ‘Now it’ll be Rob.’

  At dusk Harry and Kath drove me the fifteen miles to Mollerin. We passed two abandoned homesteads. A desiccated shrub rolled the length of a leaning picket fence and the front yard was ablaze with wild flowers: the red velvet stems of kangaroo paws and the fiery cylinders of bottle brush. A child ’s pinny flapped stiffly on a clothes’ line. The bush had already claimed one of the rear bedrooms, and sand coated the floors. ‘Doesn’t take long,’ said Kath. ‘There was a family in that one last Christmas. They came to our barbecue, then just drove away.’

  We turned past the sign warning motorists about kangaroos and into Mollerin’s main street. At first our voices and reflections in shop windows held promise, as if people would emerge in their own time. We leaned on the bonnet of a parked car which had no tyres, and watched nothing move on a windless day.

  In the general store and post office, beneath a sign, ‘Just say Golden West and choose your flavour!’ the door was open, caught by a pair of slippers. On the counter was a tax declaration for the financial year 1983–4. A newspaper’s TV guide for the first week of April 1984 lay on an ancient ‘Admiral’ television set. Then a muffled scream filled the next room, shocking us all. I opened the door with caution, and a cockatoo hurled itself past us, plumage up, feathers flying, circling, thudding into the ceiling, screeching. It eventually found the front door and soared and dived against the fading light, before perching on a telephone box. The light in the box had come on; there is no other light in Mollerin.

  Inside the community hall a banner announced ‘Merry Xmas Everyone’; another congratulated Doug Parker on having been elected captain of the Mollerin badminton team. The petrified face of a woman peered from behind the tea and biscuits counter. It was a cut-out, left perhaps as a surreal joke, to nod and smile at nothing. ‘The last New Year’s Eve cabaret we had over 200 people,’ said Harry. ‘You couldn’t get a parking place, could you, Kath?’

  Mollerin Public School had two teachers and up to fifty children and was one of the first in the State to have its own computer. It is modern, yet endearing, as the best Australian country schools are, with its tuck-shop rotas (‘Anne King to cook the pies in June . . . Pam Clarke to do the hot dogs’), a mural entitled ‘Wow, am I growing!’ and bushland as an infinite playground. Now it is empty, the small sports ground is all but overgrown and the cricket pitch is woven with cracks and the nests of large ants.

  In the great depressions of the 1890s and 1930s the only choice for most rural Australians was to wait out the difficult times in the hope that prosperity would be restored. In the 1990s this seems unlikely. Fifty per cent of Australian farmers earn less than $A11,800 a year and almost a third have no incomes at all; or they have ‘minus incomes’, which means they are heavily in debt.26 Many pay interest on their interest. Evictions are common and television crews lie in wait to film them for the evening news. As families leave and take away the young, country trades are lost and, in the end, there is nothing to restore. Other towns in the West Australian wheat belt, Bonnie Rock, Cleary and Beacon, are vanishing. People know it is happening when the authorities remove the hospital, the post office and, finally, the school.

  In summer 1989 I phoned Harry and Kath King. It was two years since I had last spoken to them and I did not expect them to answer the phone. ‘Yeah, we’re here, we’re hanging on!’ said Harry. ‘The rain finally came two years late, and we’ve had to sell off most of our machinery: the heavy stuff, the tractors and heavy trucks. This has given us just enough to satisfy the bank for a while. No one is going to throw us off! When we bail out, we’ll hand over to Rob in proper, dignified style. The way you go is important.’

  In February 1992, I phoned again; this time there was no answer. I finally found Harry and Kath in Jurien Bay, on the wild and beautiful coast north of Perth. ‘We tried’, said Harry, ‘but the debt was too much and we sold off everything to pay it. We just left the house, took the truck and headed here’.

  ‘How are you living?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re mowing lawns, the two of us. I know it sounds funny; but we don’t have a choice. Anyway, we’ve worked all our lives. The thing is, we’re not down’.

  8

  BREAKING FREE

  This is the greatest coming of age of Australia. This is the golden age of economic change.

  Paul Keating, Federal Treasurer

  Australia is the big one, the jewel of south-east Asia. Looking down the road, Australia is going to be increasingly important to the United States, and so long as Australians keep on electing the right people then there’ll be a stable relationship between the two countries.

  Victor Marchetti, CIA officer

  We won’t let you down. And we will stay involved right up to the very end of eternity because we know it’s fundamentally in our interests and hope like hell it’s in yours.

  President Bush, visiting Australia

  ON JANUARY 26, 1988 the ‘dignitaries’ assembled on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour to view the spectacle of the Bicentenary sailing ships included a familiar snowy head and florid face, dressed in familiar morning suit and holding a familiar glass of vintage champagne. It was Sir John Kerr, the former Queen’s Man who had conspired successfully to get rid of an elected Australian Government.

  Until his death in 1991, Kerr’s position as national pariah was assured. Bob Hawke did not agree and expressed little patience for those who ‘dwell upon the past’.1 Such forgiving sentiment was shared by lesser duces of the Labor Party machine, who on the great day demonstrated their generosity by queueing to greet ‘Sir John’ and even to embrace him, causing his Bollinger to splash his shoes and a waiter to be summoned to replenish ‘Sir John’s glass’.

  Several months later an election was held in New South Wales, the State run almost as a political fiefdom by the Labor machine and its Mates. Labor was beaten; and the significance of its defeat was expressed in the party’s heartland, the Hunter Valley, in towns of coal-mines and steel works and weatherboard houses, where my parents had grown up and their parents before them, where the miners had fought the Basher Gang and one colonial Government after the other for the right to a decent life, which they now lived precariously. For the first time since the colonies federated in 1901, a Labor member was not returned here. The miners, the people in the foundries, the factories, on the wharves, in the K-Mart, who represent the majority of Australians, voted with anger and bitterness for an independent to represent them in the State Parliament. The ‘workers’ party’, which had buttressed Hawke, Keating, Wran and their Mates, was disavowed.

  Every assessment showed that Labor had lost a bloodline of support because people resented its ‘silvertails’ and ‘spivs’ and the new economic and political order, which excluded them. One analysis, which did not receive the attention it deserved, was that the old Labor Party was extinct and that, in national politics, a series of ‘hung Parliaments’ was now likely, with the minority parties and independents holding the balance, and the final result determined by the Governor-General and those who backed him.2

  If this is so, then in the 1990s Australian democracy will be dependent again on the caprice of one unelected, unaccountable man and on the degree of his malleability. This may not be apparent to many, because the precedent of the part played by the Governor-General in the Whitlam coup has been distorted, consistently and painstakingly, by its beneficiaries and apologists, so that the probability of
a repetition of the events of November 11, 1975 is no longer a public issue. In 1975 no political commentator warned of what was coming. And there are no warnings now. Next time the form will be different, of course, but the dynamics, the sources of support and collaboration, are likely to be the same. Most important, the powers of the Governor-General remain unchanged. Gough Whitlam has listed them:

  He can sack the Government. He can appoint and sack individual Ministers. He can dissolve the House of Representatives. He can call or prorogue both Houses. He need not grant a double dissolution although the Government asks for it. He need not assent to a Bill. He need not submit a Bill to alter the Constitution which has twice been passed by one House, even if he is advised to do so by the Government.

  He need not assent to a Bill to alter the Constitution even if it’s been approved by the electors. And he need not assent to any Bills which are passed by both Houses.

  Whitlam added that the Australian constitution made the Governor-General, as the Queen’s representative, commander of all military forces. ‘A lot of people have said: ‘Why didn’t I defy him? Why didn’t I tear up his letter? The answer is that this man would have called out the armed forces . . . There would have been chaos in this country.’3

  Few Australians, I believe, are aware of the existence of such despotic reserve powers, which are unheard of in any other advanced democracy, and which are dangerous. To break free from them is imperative if Australia is ever to achieve independence from its imperial legacy and from the colonial state of mind that permeates its political life.

  The sad story of Bill Hayden is instructive. Hayden is the present Governor-General. A former Whitlam Minister, Hayden was leader of the Labor Party until Bob Hawke and his faction pushed him aside in 1983. Long regarded by his supporters as the keeper of the nation’s political conscience and its egalitarian spirit, Hayden was an avowed republican who spoke out often and passionately against the position and power of the Governor-General. In 1988 Hayden underwent a swift conversion. The job of Governor-General fell vacant and he applied, explaining that his past criticism and support for republicanism had been made in the heat of the moment. ‘I don’t find the idea of the role repugnant,’ he said. ‘It is a role with considerable public prestige and respect.’4

  The more Hayden spoke about ‘the role’ and its ‘prestige and respect’, the more it became clear that he yearned for it, and had yearned for it for some time. He said, ‘If you allow for my background from infancy at south Brisbane [a working-class area], where we never saw the Governor-General and rarely saw a politician, let alone ever expected that someone from that area would ever assume such a respected office, then the more I look at it, the more I find it a very exciting role . . . I think there’s a case for very ordinary Australians to have a share of the action . . . It would allow, I hope, my wife and our children, and maybe one day our grandchildren, the opportunity for them to say, “Well, the old chap came from south Brisbane without much hope, and look where he ended up.”’5

  When he finally ended up in the vice-regal mansion, with the butler and the Rolls-Royces, the portrait of Sir John Kerr and the numerous ‘perks’ paid for by people’s taxes, a newspaper headline said, ‘Dream finally comes true for the poor boy from Mabel Street.’6 On his first official visit to Sydney, the new Governor-General spoke about ‘the dignity and stature of this high public office’. He referred to ‘dignity’ three times; and women in large floral hats curtsied to him, apparently unaware that you curtsy only to the Queen.

  The colonial state of mind is not always obvious. The politicians and public servants of the new order, who guide and advise on the nation’s economic life and see themselves, even during a recession, as ultra-modern ‘economic rationalists’, or ‘econocrats’, have a colonial mentality disciplined to serve overseas interests. The ‘world view’, to which they are wedded, requires nothing less. Australia has long been the most foreign-owned country in the world, apart from Canada; but since Paul Keating dismantled the last major protective barriers, Australia has become the economic ‘banana republic’ Keating himself once described: a ‘First World’ country with a ‘Third World’ economy. As in the Third World, transnational companies are denuding Australia’s finite resources while the national debt grows and grows. That Australia no longer is able to trade its way out of debt is part of a pattern familiar in Latin America. Like his Brazilian counterpart, the Australian Treasurer must pay regular visits to Wall Street and Washington to sing for his country’s credit rating.

  Like most small and vulnerable countries, Australia has become trapped in the world of ‘money power’, which has brought about the economic harshness of the 1990s. The Australian political economist Ted Wheelwright has described money power as ‘a force quite divorced from production and the real world, but by its gyrations it determines whether industries live or die. Its activities are now parasitical and quite undemocratic; it is the source of the main immediate danger to the system, of a financial collapse.’ In Australia’s ‘transnational economy’ money is free to flow to the points of highest return anywhere in the world, and wages forgone become profit which can flow out of the country or into money market speculation rather than be invested in employment-creating industries.7 Few Australians reading their daily newspapers are made aware of this. Dissenters from the orthodoxy, such as Professor Wheelwright, are seldom heard or read by the public. Instead, the ‘econocrats’ and soothsayers wait passively in front of their electronic screens to be told about the next ‘world crisis’ on the stock market or in banking, property speculation, commodity prices and oil prices.

  Unless Australia breaks free from this trap, Australians will pay a price in permanent high unemployment (in 1992 it touched 11 per cent), in sharply reduced wages and living standards, and intractable poverty. Sydney and Melbourne do not have the scale of sub-life of New York and Detroit; not yet. Australia is not the property of the great Japanese zaibatsu companies; not yet; and Australians are not the ‘poor white trash’ of an Asia whose promotional model is go-getting, repressive Singapore; not yet. But Japan already operates a veto over much of the Australian economy, and by the end of the 1990s Australian skilled workers will earn less than their counterparts in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea.

  The solution surely is not to build an isolationist, ‘Fortress Australia’. It is to manage fairly the natural resources of which Australia has more per head of population than any other nation. It is first to provide the necessities of food, clothing, shelter and transport for all the people of Australia. It is to assault child poverty, a national shame, by ending the gross inequities and waste in the tax system and shifting financial power back to the majority. And it is to unravel the ties with the catastrophic, debt-ridden American economy, and it is to trade with the peoples of the Pacific and Asia on a planned basis: buying that which Australia cannot economically produce – not free trade, but fair trade.

  If Australians are serious about living fairly in their own region, rather than as occupants of an antiquated imperial lighthouse, the issue is even wider. No other developed country is such a geographical part of the ‘developing world’ – that is the majority of humanity – than Australia. There is a war currently being waged against this majority by forces representing the new ‘transnational’ order. It is a war of rich against poor; and it is a cost effective war. Indeed, the profits to date have surpassed all expectations. In the period 1983–90, the poor countries paid £98,000 to the rich countries in interest payments on debt that may well be impossible to pay back. That is a net figure, after taking into account new loans and all new aid.8 The international banks such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are based in Washington and manipulated by US governments, say there is no way forward other than that of ‘growth’ and ‘structurally adjusted’ economics in which export production and foreign investment have every priority and health care, education and decent employment have none. Australians, with their debt-
laden colonial economy, are on the sidelines of this war. But they can hear the gunfire, which is not so distant now.

  Like Ted Wheelwright, Ted Trainer is an Australian thinker whose views are not widely known. Trainer says that if the present growth rates were to double, only seven poor countries would reach the level of the rich majority in 100 years and only nine more would do so in the next 1000 years. In the meantime all the gains of ‘growth’ go to the few; one-fifth of the world consumes four-fifths of its resources, while child malnutrition increases, with 43,000 deaths every day. The majority cannot feed themselves often because they are compelled by their foreign creditors to grow luxury crops for the rich – such as coffee and carnations. This is the real meaning of ‘international market forces at work’ and the unspoken price of ‘growth’. It is a truth that deserves to be printed as a health warning in the financial sections of newspapers.

  What is interesting about Australia is that, although ‘developed’, it is also a victim of indebtedness and of ‘market forces at work’. This gives Australians a shared vulnerability with their closest neighbours – and with the majority of humanity. Those Australians who understand this, and are able to act upon their understanding, will promote both the independence of their country and of their region.9

  The opponents of real independence are formidable, as Gough Whitlam learned. Australia’s place in the world community, its relations with its own region, continue to be defined by the strategic interests of the dominant great power. Public discussion about this is ‘tricky’, as Australians say; yet few would want a return to the silence and ignorance of the 1950s and 1960s, when a mendacious Menzies allowed one great power to drop nuclear bombs on his country and committed young Australians to die in the cause of another. Few would want this, but perhaps few realise that the aims and machinations of the 1990s are different only in form.

 

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